Report: Apple On Antitrust Regulators' Radar

The New York Post reported Monday that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission are "days away" from figuring out which of the two will conduct an antitrust inquiry into Apple's move to prohibit cross-compilers, which allow developers to write iPhone apps using languages other than Apple's Objective-C.

Quoting "a person familiar with the matter," the New York Post said investigators will try to figure out whether Apple's licensing change constitutes the type of anti-competitive act that would warrant a full-fledged antitrust probe.

As noted elsewhere, it's profoundly ironic that Apple may be facing antitrust scrutiny given how well it has played the underdog role for well over a decade. But booming iPhone and Mac sales have helped Apple shares more than double in the past year, and Apple's market cap of $242 billion is creeping closer to the stratospheric heights of Microsoft ($270 billion). Apple is anything but an underdog these days, and even the "Get A Mac" campaign has been put out to pasture.

There are plenty of implications here for Microsoft: Apple's iPhone SDK licensing changes may also block other compiling tools like Monotouch, which allows developers to create C# and .NET based applications for the iPhone. Similar tools like Unity and Titantium may also be affected.

While it may be oversimplifying things to depict Microsoft's massive developer army as underdogs in this situation, many are talking about the howls of protest that would ensue if Microsoft were to make such a move.

Apple made the change when it unveiled the iPhone 4.0 SDK beta but didn't mention it during its April 8 press conference. The change came a few days before Adobe launched Flash Professional CS 5 and essentially cancelled out one of the product's core features, Packager For iPhone compiler. Adobe says it'll keep the feature in the current version of CS5 but has suspended further development.

Not surprisingly, Adobe was furious with Apple's timing. Lee Brimelow, a platform evangelist at Adobe, raised eyebrows with his "Go screw yourself Apple" declaration, and Apple CEO and Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen have since blogged their respective stances on the matter.